Malaysia here I come!

Finally, after 4 months of worrying where I will be working during the outplacement, I got the news. The reason why I say “worrying” is not because I will be leaving Norway for six months, but the fact that the potential countries are so diverse. Prior to the selection, the trainee’s were asked to make a list ranking the top three countries that we were interested to move to. In my ranking, I placed Malaysia and Thailand on top. The reason being the rare opportunity to live, work and experience the Asian cultures. I was therefore pleased to get the message that I will be working in Kuala Lumpur for six months, beginning in April. The opportunity to live and work for 6 months in Malaysia is something that I’m very much looking forward to.

Business Development in Norway
Currently, I’m working in Business Norway in a unit called Business Development. Our task is to be one step ahead of our business customers in order to respond quickly to the demand for new products, services and solutions. It’s a challenge to predict what the market will need in the coming years. It might sound as if we are lab rats, trying to come up with new revolutionary technologies; however its more like research into the trend pictures combined with the advances in technology that are driving the change in communication. A great deal of our responsibility is to be aware of and familiar with the different activities that are running within Telenor Norway, Telenor OPCOs, our customers, other countries and our competitors.

Stake out possible strategies
Most of the projects that I’m involved in are projects that we call strategizing projects. As the name indicates, these projects aim to stake out a possible strategy, based on the findings in the project. Such projects will result in either a go-ahead or a termination. If we get the go-ahead, it will initiate the next phase which would be a more extensive work to develop an implementation plan.

Working on these projects includes a lot of research and learning to understand the concepts. Even though we have an idea of a direction when initiated, the scope tends to be modified during the life of the project as we discover new or better opportunities.

Working here in Business Development has been a very good and enjoyable experience this far. I will try to write more on this later on and more on the trip to KL.

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